The Keeper of All Mystery
by Mme Bahorel
Summary: A bourgeois upbringing requires a thorough study of class relations, composed of many cases with long hair and petticoats, bright eyes and delicate ankles. A series of first encounters with the female sex.
1. Combeferre: Paris, 1824

"Well, it doesn't look bad. Two rooms, very good. One never enjoys entertaining when one's guests must sit on the bed. Have you a girl installed yet?"

"Father!"

"Don't look so scandalised. The answer is no, I see it in your face."

"My studies take up a great deal of time," Julien tried to explain.

"Everyone's studies can take up a great deal of time. Well, friends first, girls second, I suppose. You do have friends?"

"Yes," he answered defensively. Two classmates, Laffitte from the linguistics lectures, and the two gentlemen who worshiped Byron could not be considered friends, precisely, but they would serve if necessary under further interrogation.

"Good, good. Shall I ask your uncle to look out for you? Take you somewhere, of an evening. I couldn't possibly do it – you're far too old for that."

Dear god, he was still on about girls, wasn't he? "I think I can manage it myself," Julien stammered. "The human race could not have survived for millennia if procreation were not an instinct."

"Yes, very good. Go with some of your friends, make a party of it. You'll enjoy it that much more." M. Combeferre turned to go, but added, "Your mother sends her love."

"Really?" Julien asked skeptically.

"Yes," his father answered, but without looking at him. "Well, good day to you."

There was nothing for it – he would have to endure these sorts of questions until he could state honestly that yes, he had known a woman and enjoyed it. The obvious solution was to simply stop in at one of the licensed brothels and have the thing done, but Combeferre was not certain he could further a woman's degradation merely to please his father. And what if a part of him did enjoy it? He would be lost forever. Economic relations could not be brought into it, not if he were to live with himself after. But then what was the choice? To seduce a girl at a dance hall? Or, more accurately, to allow himself to be seduced by a girl at a dance hall? How was that, in truth, any better than a girl with a pass? At least the licensed whore was honest, acknowledging her position. The grisette was perhaps worse, giving of herself in exchange for trinkets and attention, debasing herself little by little until she had no choice other than accepting a pass or ending up in la Force, before ending her days in the Salpetrière.

He tried out this line of inquiry on Courfeyrac, who had listened with interest and sympathy to other inquiries into economic relations, but on this occasion, the boy clapped him on the back and said, "Only a virgin thinks like that, and it's the only thing virginal about you. We must rectify those humours, my dear fellow. Bahorel will know just the place."

"I can manage on my own, thank you."

"If you could, you would have by now. My first was a farm girl, on Easter Sunday, after mass."

Combeferre was fairly certain it was bragging, not reminiscence, and entirely possibly untrue. There was very little of the pastoral in Courfeyrac, for all he claimed to have grown up in a village, a village! It didn't even have walls! It may not have had walls, but it almost certainly had a brothel – Combeferre was certain his father and M. de Courfeyrac would agree completely on the subject of raising sons should they ever have occasion to meet. "Yes, but your father took you out of school as often as he was permitted." And almost certainly gave you the money for the girl, he refrained from added.

"And you've been out how long now and haven't managed to catch a girl's eye?" Courfeyrac wagged his finger teasingly. "You have been keeping very poor company, indeed."

"Did you hear a word I said about degradation and exploitation and relations of the sexes as compared to relations of the bourgeois and working classes?"

"Yes, and it's fascinating, but when a girl wants to be exploited, you exploit her." He waved over Bahorel, who pulled over a chair from another table and sat backwards, leaning his arms on the rail. "Our abbé of the Supreme Being is in need of corruption."

"Corruption."

"Of the carnal variety."

"Of course," Bahorel grinned. "The priests of the Republic cannot be celibate. Neither should they embrace such a bourgeois institution as marriage."

"Where should we take him?"

"I don't need to be taken anywhere," Combeferre protested.

"Then why did you tell us?" Combeferre didn't answer. He knew perfectly well that only from this company could the solution his father wanted come, and if pressed, he would have to admit that he ought not to enter into marriage without experience. Instinct would lead to procreation, but experience would possibly get there by a more direct route. "It'll have to be a _maison de tolérance_ – I don't think he'd do well with a nice girl from a dance hall," Bahorel said only somewhat quietly to Courfeyrac.

"I know. Better to learn the object of wooing before one learns to woo. But where?"

"How much are you willing to spend?" Bahorel asked. Combeferre merely shrugged his shoulders.

"The high end, then – we shall set you up properly! Mère Romain's restaurant?"

"What if there's a raid?" Courfeyrac asked.

"A _maison_ it shall be, then. Déléry?" he considered. "No, better Guinot." Then it came to him, an epiphany Combeferre did not like at all. "Paret. Mère Paret. Yes. When shall we go? We'll all go. Tonight?" Combeferre must have blanched – he certainly felt ill at the thought – because Bahorel corrected himself. "Tomorrow. We shall dine, go to the opera, and decamp for Mère Paret's."

"You see? Bahorel can sort anything."

"Where to go is but the beginning of the trouble."

"It shall be no trouble once you see the merchandise. Hell, maybe we'll find someone suitable at the theatre."

"Yes, because she'll go home with him and be disappointed, leaving us high and dry merely because we lack his good looks," Courfeyrac complained, not entirely in jest.

"You talk as if I ought to have successfully attracted and bedded a woman before now."

"Yes, you ought to have done. If someone who looks like him can," Courfeyrac said, jabbing a thumb at Bahorel, "you ought to have long before now."

"Oi! I'll have you know -"

"Handsomest man in the village, we know. Village of circus freaks." Bahorel got him into a headlock, but they were both laughing, Combeferre trying not to smile at the scene they were making. He still had no real idea why they continued to bother with him, but there were times he enjoyed their boisterous company.

The following evening was not one of those times, however. Dinner, the opera, sitting in the pit so that Bahorel could keep an eye on the ballet chorus, these were all familiar entertainments, even if Combeferre preferred to sit at the rear of the auditorium with the aficionados, out of the way of the rowdies, where one might actually see the stage and even hear some of the singing. Mère Paret's, however, was completely unknown.

When Bahorel had said he would set him up properly, and that it would cost, Combeferre had hardly expected that "properly" meant a house just off a fashionable street, the door answered by a well-dressed maidservant. After Bahorel dropped a few names, they were ushered into a dimly lit parlour, empty of people but for the lady of the house, a large dark woman who greeted them as if they were the children of old friends.

"Ah, my boys, how are you this evening? You are well? That is so good to hear. What good offices might I be able to perform for you tonight?"

Combeferre's mouth was dry, and he had no idea how to phrase what had brought him here even if he were able to speak. This was not at all the sort of place where one could state his business outright, even if it was a licensed brothel. Bahorel spoke for him. "My friend is sadly behind his time. How may we bring him up to date?"

Mère Paret examined him with all the care Combeferre might have expected if she were one of his mother's friends deciding if he be permitted to have more than one dance with her daughter. "You are quite certain? Oh, this is a tragedy. How can a youth flower when it is choked with its own emissions? You shall have your release tonight, my dear boy."

"No virgins," Bahorel told her.

"Not at all," she agreed. "No, not at all. Have you a preference, monsieur?" she asked Combeferre.

"Preference?" he managed to spit out.

"Dark, fair, tall, short, buxom, lithe? We do what we can to cater to our visitors' tastes."

"I never thought about it."

She leaned in a little. "Oh, but you have. Come, you have. You have had thoughts, fantasies, inclinations," she said insinuatingly.

It was true. "Tall and lithe," he muttered, looking at the floor. It was not the fashion, and he rather feared the ridicule of the friends who had brought him here, but they said nothing for once.

Mère Paret rang a bell and asked that Lisette be brought in. Soon enough, a tall blonde of actual beauty entered the parlour, her pale evening gown exposing a great deal of décolletage, her hair tumbling over one shoulder. She came directly to Mère Paret and, at a sign, curtsied to Combeferre. He had expected the degradation he believed in, a worn out woman who would lie back and accept his fumbling ministrations for the coin. The parlour had to be merely a setting in which the low quality of the merchandise would not be noted, as a false jeweler is careful to display gilt on velvet. The truth seemed as far from his expectations as could be. It was hard to believe this girl would merely accept anything that did not please her, yet neither was he intimidated by the thought that he could not possibly please her.

"What do you think?" Mère Paret asked.

"You lucky bastard," Bahorel whispered in his ear. "My first wasn't half so good looking."

"How beautiful she is," he said, only later realising it was aloud.

"Treat him gently, my darling," Mère Paret ordered the girl. "He is a pupil."

Lisette took his hand, and as he followed her up the stairs, Combeferre could hear the procuress turn to his friends in a far more cheerful voice. "Now, boys, how shall you pass the time?" She could read her clientele very well.

In Lisette's room – he briefly wondered if it were her room or simply a room in which all the women took clients, until she kissed him and he completely forgot how to think – two candles were reflected in the mirror above the bed, and there was a heavy scent of perfume, as if the fire in the grate were composed of sandalwood. He thought she could kiss the life out of him, and he did not much care if that were the case. The familiar insistent pressure at the flap of his trousers was released by expert hands, the long white fingers caressing his cock as it had never been touched before.

Later, he realised her dress must have ingenious fastenings, for he had no idea how she managed to slip out of it and stand before him in a shift that barely covered her bottom, her stays covered in dark flowered silk in pleasant contrast to the nearly transparent muslin through which he could even now perceive the darker hair between her legs. She managed to strip him as expertly as she had undressed herself, possibly because he was willing to permit her anything so long as she kept his head swimming in the combination of nervous sensation from her hand on his cock and the view of that thick rope of blonde hair crossing her white breast and glinting like gold in the flicker of candlelight.

She pulled him down into the soft depths of the featherbed and spread her legs, the dark hair of the venusian mound showing a hint of pink where it ought to be pierced. "Come now, dear," she said, the first words she had spoken yet, her voice low and husky with an Eastern, almost German, accent. Her very voice was intoxicating. "Shall I guide you?"

"Please." He suddenly felt terribly young and faulty, but she helped him to find the entrance, and instinct took over. Which was for the best, as all he could see, when he could see, was the white rise of her breasts and her collarbone, just to where her neck curved up from her shoulders, and that blonde hair. Whiteness and a curve as explosions of sensation rocked his brain, his hips and hers moving in time, in perfect rhythm. He was bent over her somehow, and she ran her fingers through his hair, setting his scalp on fire, every nerve terribly, delightfully engaged. Somehow it climaxed, not at all as when he had engaged in the so-called sin of onanism but with an intensity he could hardly have imagined, and then it was all over.

Not entirely over, as the dim light and the perfume and the girl were still there, but his senses had returned. She was not so young as he had feared, definitely his senior, though well-kept, her clear complexion real and not faked with a heavy coat of powder. She permitted him to run his fingers down her cheek, to kiss her, to bury his face in that curve of neck and shoulder and breathe in her perfume and sweat and distinctly female scent. He did not care in that moment what had brought her here, why she was in Paris and in such straits as to need a pass. He cared only that she felt natural in his arms, her lips on his the only possible conjunction of bodies in space. She pushed herself into a sitting position but let him continue to explore her for as long as he liked, and he was grateful for it. There was a reciprocity, an equivalence in the two of them sitting on the bed, questioning each other through touch rather than voice, learning the parts of a woman in the life, not in the morgue.

He thanked her softly, not entirely certain that he wanted the evening to end, but knowing that he must pull away or become irrevocably lost. She helped him to dress, tying his cravat herself and smoothing his hair, giving him a final kiss before closing the door, leaving a layer of wood between them. He felt terribly alone as he walked back down the dark stairs, into the dim red parlour, where Mère Paret and Courfeyrac sat waiting.

"Ah, here is a man who has seen the mysteries," Mère Paret said.

Bahorel bounded down the stairs behind him and threw an arm around Combeferre's shoulders. "We are much in your debt, madame."

"In truth," Combeferre managed to agree. Courfeyrac made their proper goodbyes to the procuress and followed them out into the shockingly cold November night.

"Well, how do you feel?" Bahorel asked Combeferre.

Combeferre wasn't entirely certain he could answer. Cold. Worn out. Terribly small and insignificant compared to the greatness of creation as measured by the sexual instinct. "How ought I to feel?"

"Powerful."

But he didn't feel it at all, and it was a relief to see Courfeyrac shake his head. "No. With the right woman, the power is hers. We are at their mercy. That is the intoxication, the only moment when we are completely under their power. We give in, she takes everything we have, because it is her due, she demands and we give in." He could seem terribly young at times, particularly when in the company of the much older Bahorel, but there was a fervency in his tone that transcended his youth. Enjolras could speak in such tones of the Republic to come, but somehow, Courfeyrac did not seem petty when speaking of carnal relations in that manner. This, too, was a power that could change the world.

Combeferre found himself sliding over to Courfeyrac's side, slipping an arm around Courfeyrac's shoulders and pleased that Courfeyrac slipped his arm around his waist in return. Courfeyrac could throw his arms around a complete stranger without a thought, merely out of cheerful instinct, but Combeferre could never feel so free. This was the best he could do, and Courfeyrac seemed to understand and appreciate what little he could give. "Is it always like that?"

"With the right girl, always."


	2. Courfeyrac: Sorgues, 1822

The sickness – a fever, rash, and swelling in the neck – was something the school doctor had never seen before. It spread through about half the boys quickly, outstripping the capacity of the infirmary. But when a large portion of the students still had no symptoms after several days, the headmaster thought it best to send home at least those who lived rather nearby, the day boys already being given a holiday due to the infection. The disease would be better contained, the teachers could relax, and the ill could recover or die in peace, whichever the Lord preferred. At least it was Easter, and the boys would hardly miss any work.

Thus René was home for at least a week, being in perfectly stout health. A whole week with Juliette, and Gilles stayed in Avignon where he belonged.

Spring was always better at home. The walls of the school – the walls of Avignon in general – seemed to keep the winter inside, to channel the mistral but to keep the soft spring breezes out in the fields and pastures. There were gardens in Avignon, of course, the scent of almond trees in bloom occasionally wafting over the walls, overtaking the usual scents of the city, but nothing could possibly compare to Sorgues, surrounded by fields and vineyards and orchards without any trace of a wall to keep nature at bay. René was supposed to be good when he was at home, a credit to the school, and Juliette was supposed to behave rather more like a lady now that she was thirteen, but she still wanted him to push her as high as possible on the swing in the great horse chestnut tree that shadowed their garden and to run through the fallow fields, blue with _scilles_ and yellow with cowslip.

It was a grand holiday, the spring sky bluer than the wild hyacinths, the breezes soft as a lover's breath. No books, no Latin or Greek composition, no recitation of kings of France or anything else could trouble the peace of a fifteen year old boy on an unexpected holiday, so long as he was not caught helping his sister put flowers in her hair.

"Is this how a bride should look?" she asked once. Only once.

"Don't be an idiot. Who'd marry you?"

She poked her tongue out at him and that was that. "Boys have no sense of romance," she complained.

But that was not entirely true, since René was still perfectly willing to join in her other playacting, to be the troubadour romancing her princess even if he were her brother. Though one could do very little playacting between Good Friday and Easter Sunday if one did not want to have another lecture from one's father over how the neighbours tended to take it very ill when children were bellowing old Provençal love songs in arbours not their own. "We don't have an arbour!" was not an appropriate excuse at Easter. The troubadour had to be left to Sundays less holy.

But Easter mass was brilliant enough in the village. René was not permitted to engage in the procession, no longer being considered a resident of the village now that he was away at school, but he was thrilled to watch the other village boys enact the stations of the cross. In Avignon, so much was determined by the social position of the adults and the fellowship societies that had taken the place of the old guilds wiped out by the Revolution, but Sorgues was too small to care if your father owned the tavern or was a farm labourer so long as you could hold up your end of the cross and speak your part in something approximating French.

It was during the procession that René first noticed the girl. Everyone in Avignon looked the same, their styles copied from Paris, but in Sorgues, most of the farm women and some of the men still dressed in the traditional manner for festivals, including at Easter. This girl could not have been much his senior, but there was something terribly inviting about the way she held her head high, the bright kerchief around her shoulders drawing the eye to her bosom where the ends crossed and disappeared into her waist, the yellows and reds in her kerchief a delightful contrast to the blues of her quilted skirt and the bright white pocket tied around her waist. She noticed him staring at her through the gaps in the procession, and rather than redden with embarrassment or turn up her nose at his youth, she met his eyes evenly and slowly smiled.

Something moved in the pit of his stomach, a hard knot of longing that he wanted to grip with both hands as he went to her. But the procession was in the way, and he had to keep his hands at his sides for fear Juliette would turn to him and ask if he managed to eat himself into a stomachache already. It would hardly have been the first Easter that he managed to find the sweets before breakfast and refused to share, but he had been good this year and had not gone looking for the sweets. He had only eaten his egg, a deeply dyed red one the same shade as the flowers in the girl's kerchief.

The entire village, and the farmers from the outlying districts, collected for mass, the one day a year the church would be filled. René and Juliette were both to take communion – Juliette's first had been the year before – and waited with their father, pretending to a semblance of Christian virtue. At least Juliette did, while René looked around for the girl.

Juliette poked him in the ribs. "What are you doing?" she hissed.

"Looking for Florian," he lied. He never lied to his sister, but it came out so easily. And in church. On Easter Sunday. Right before taking communion. He was so going to Hell. So he did look around once more, for Florian, because then it wouldn't be a lie, but that was when he saw the girl. She was in line for communion, too, far back, with the labourers. She had the brightest kerchief of any of them, its pattern more yellow than red, bright even in the dim church. He turned around quickly so she would not see him staring.

Juliette turned around, found Florian straight away, and pointed very obviously. "He's right over there. You should say something to him after."

"Juliette, we are in the house of God on the holiest day of the year. If it is impolite to point, then on this day, in this place, it is a sin." Though both children could see M. de Courfeyrac was going through the motions for the neighbours; at home, he never said anything about sin. They apologised anyway. One made allowances for the neighbours.

René usually liked communion – it made him feel grown up knowing that he was supposed to take his own spiritual redemption in hand. But today, he wanted nothing more than to swallow down his wafer and sip of wine and get into the spring sunshine as quickly as possible. His spiritual redemption was far less important than seeing where the girl would go. "I'll see you at home later."

"He's trying to see if Florian will talk to him," he heard Juliette tell their father. It certainly sounded better than the truth, which was that Florian never would talk to him again. For three years, he had been trying to apologise for the lark that got them both expelled from the local collège, and for three years, Florian had refused to listen. But it was no use thinking on that when he had to keep an eye out for the girl.

The girl seemed to walk alone, strange on a feast day for someone so young. Her dark hair was covered with a white lace cap, whiter even than her muslin pocket, one black lock having fallen across her brow, bouncing as she walked on determinedly. René hurried to catch up with her. She was taller than he was – he had not yet hit the rapid growth of the other boys in his class, though he was certain it would happen any day – and she walked with the quick long strides of someone who regularly covered long distances over the fields. He had seen farm girls before, of course, and he had seen girls in town, but he was certain he had never seen a girl like this one, so young and so mature and so beautiful all at once.

"Bonjour!" he finally called out to her, reddening horrifically when she turned to see who hailed her. But she smiled – she must have recognised him from the procession, otherwise why would she smile?

"Bonjorn."

Bloody hell, he thought. Of course she doesn't speak French. Three years of boarding school had meant three years hearing the patois very little, and medieval love poetry was rather short on the courtesy of daily life. What comes next? "_Cossí anatz_?" Had he just accidentally used the formal version of "how are you?" He used what he thought he heard most.

But it must have been the formal, because she laughed as she answered. Laughed merrily, so that he was embarrassed but also enthralled. She let him come directly up to her. Her skin was fair in contrast to her dark hair. He wanted desperately to touch her cheek, but he knew better than to precipitately reach for an animal – even a dog would run away or lash out if a gentle touch were unexpected. Not that she was an animal at all, of course, but there was a wildness in her dark brown eyes that she shared with the deer, gentle but patently not domestic.

"My name is René," he introduced himself. "_Cossí - _?" Oh, hell, where was the rest of his brain? He could barely formulate words in French, much less in Provençal. "And you?"

"Johaneta." She was probably in the parish register as Jeanne, René thought, which was a horrid thing to do to such a girl. The very sound of her name was magical, one could trace a direct line through Johan Esteve of Béziers. Her very beauty could make her a descendant of Johan's _bel rai_. Of course the church would try to make her a bland Jeanne.

"_T'aimi_." He had no idea he had even said it aloud, the part of his brain still capable of thought considering asking "Please, may I kiss you?" rather than stating outright "I love you". She paused a moment, looking at him with her deer-brown eyes, but then she laughed and kissed him anyway, without his needing to ask. _Bel rai_, beautiful sunbeam, indeed, warm on his lips, lingering in a way he had never dreamed of kissing anyone, even her, and then gone just as suddenly, running away across the fields of _scilles_, laughing as she went. He had merely wanted to dare a peck at the lips, not the lingering caress she had so freely given.

He ran after her, knowing only that he wanted to kiss her again, that the knot in his stomach had loosened into fire from the moment her lips touched his and he wanted more, not caring if it burned all his insides away. They were hers to do with as she would – heart, stomach and all. The courtly love of the troubadours would permit no less than the dedication of his life for far less reward than the kiss already bestowed. How could he give her any less? Everything about this beautiful Johaneta demanded that sacrifice, if sacrifice such a loving donation could possibly be called. Her laughter, the way she permitted him to catch up to her, the way she twirled him around in the fields as if they were children making the world spin – he was conscious of everything about her as he had never been conscious of anything before, and yet it was all a blur, as if his mind could not retain all the sensation thrown at it. And when he fell down on top of her, both dizzy and giggling, he did not need her permission to kiss her again, or to pull off her lace cap so he could finger her tightly coiled braids.

She was not laughing when she lifted her heavy quilted skirt and spread her legs, nor when she pulled at the buttons of the fall of his trousers. He was hard as anything and conscious of that fact, too, but he had thought, if he had thought, that he would have to do something about it later. He had not even considered that she might be willing to sate him. The poems never spoke of this part. He had certainly not considered that she might take off her bright kerchief and wrap it around his shoulders, using it to pull him down on top of her, only a thin layer of muslin bodice between him and her small, firm breasts, her flash of smile lingering in his mind.

In retrospect, it was a nightmare. He was somehow more conscious of her breasts than he was of her muff, the one being visible and the other not. He recalled nothing of her facial expressions during the act, possibly because his awareness was suddenly focused squarely on her breasts, on the way that the wrinkles in her bodice accentuated a single nipple. At some point, he managed to slip inside her, and she pulled him down firmly with the kerchief, her arms around him now, their hips rocking in perfect rhythm. This was the apex of life, he was certain, this conjunction of girl and breast and sunlight and wildflowers. However, that perfect rhythm lasted a very short time, and soon he was limp, a dead weight on her, and still very much aware of that nipple.

The only conscious thought he had was that he must touch that nipple, possibly with his tongue. What must her bodice taste like? But she pushed him off instead, sliding out from under him and wrapping her kerchief back around her, the tantalising nipple now hidden completely.

René felt awful. He had failed somehow in expressing his love for her. Because he did still love her, her beauty, her initiative, her daring, her good humour before his horrific mistake. "I'm sorry. _Perdon_," he apologised, sitting in the grass, elbows on knees like the unfortunate schoolboy he knew he had just proved he was. She had given him a chance, despite his height, and he had proved he must be a child rather than a youth.

But she sat down next to him and handed him a bright yellow cowslip, gay as her kerchief, and she smiled, and she let him touch her cheek, which was rougher with wind and sun than he had expected but more brilliant for the difference, and kiss her again and twine _scilles_ as blue as her skirt into her braids.

"_T'aimi_," he told her again. "I love you." And she laughed, Johan's _bel rai_ indeed. He felt very warm, and very happy, when she took his hand and led him back to the road to Avignon. She had put her cap into her pocket, and the light breeze danced through the flowers in her hair. But after one last kiss, she pointed him up the road, back to Sorgues. "_T'aimi_," he repeated. She said something he could not catch and ruffled his hair. "_Adieusiatz_, Johaneta," he said to her very seriously, though he suddenly wondered if he were again accidentally using the formal. Yet considering what they had just done, perhaps it was appropriate? She may have been only a farm girl, but she had been the one teaching him, taking him by the hand to initiate him into the mysteries. How could he address her other than in the utmost respect?

"_Adieusiatz_, René." She seemed to cradle his name in her tongue, making it sound almost romantic. Almost. How could anything in workaday French sound romantic compared to "Johaneta"?

René was very happy as he walked home, the gay spring sunshine reflecting his mood. Until he arrived, and Juliette asked, "What kept you so long?"

"I went for a walk."

"A walk," M. de Courfeyrac said, looking him over. "A walk through the fields."

"Yes."

"But not alone, I don't think," he speculated with amusement. "Juliette, go see how the cook is getting on."

"Papa!"

"I need to speak to your brother alone." She pulled a face and went into the kitchen. "Some girl has a green back, doesn't she?" René reddened. There was something very coarse in the expression, even though it was true. "I recognise the grass stains." He clapped his son on the back. "Congratulations. This is the sort of mischief I wholly condone. Who was she?"

"A farm girl," René admitted. He had been in enough trouble in his fifteen years to know when to withhold the truth and when to give in, and this reception, coarse though it was compared to the flights of Johan Esteve, was a time to give in.

"Ah, to be young in the country in spring. Reproduction is in the very air, the very earth, the very water. Was she beautiful? Well, of course she was, I don't have to ask that. I wouldn't expect anything less from a son of mine. You'll have something to confess next year," he said gleefully. "On Easter Sunday. Resurrection, indeed. A farm girl isn't good for much else, but it's probably best you don't let the neighbours find out."

"Dinner is ready," Juliette interrupted.

"Manners."

"I don't have to use manners at home when you're talking to René behind my back. It's not fair." And she dropped into her chair, her arms crossed, determined to have an ill expression on her face. Until René gave her the cowslip Johaneta had slipped into his coat. It was a small price to pay for peace at the family table.

He couldn't have brought a flower back to school as a keepsake, in any case – he was teased enough as it was. The true keepsake was in his heart, in the knowledge that between courtly love and green backs, there was a perfect middle way. He had glimpsed it in that brief moment of rhythmic union, and he was certain that with much practice, he could not only find it again, but extend it, embrace it, live it. Everyone should live in the blue-green joy between fields of _scilles_ and spring Provençal skies.


	3. Bahorel: Giscaro, 1817

Bahorel: Giscaro, 1817

At school, he was called Gustave Bahorel and spoke French; at home, he was Gustau Bahoreu, and he spoke Occitan. A strong lad of seventeen, he was helping with one final harvest before going to Paris, that great central metropolis none of his family had ever seen. The Bahoreus were Gascons, growers of wheat and vines, the vines of late doing better in the market than the wheat. They were well on their way to becoming the chief family of the district, having bought into the national lands, but they were people of labour, sending their son away to school so he might attempt to aggrandise his position someday. It was not for the family as a whole to worry about. They were not that sort of people. Their bread was well-mixed with rye, even though they could afford to keep the pure wheat from their own fields, because thrift was second nature, and they could not bear to be seen in the district as ambitious for luxury. White bread was for the foreigners and occasionally for the invalid elderly who could no longer eat the rough brown bread. That was the sort of people the Bahoreus were.

Thus Gustau was hefting baskets of grapes into the wagons that would take them to the _cuvier_, orpressing room. He was away from home too much to be trusted to cut the grapes; carrying was what he could be trusted to do. To take the large baskets at the end of the row, where the cutters emptied the baskets they carried on their backs, and stack them in the wagons, placing an empty basket at the end of the next row for the cutters. When the wagon was full, M. Bahoreu would send it, driven by one of the old men, to the cuvier, where Gustau would then unload the grapes in preparation for the evening's pressing. All this was for the table wine the Bahoreus sold in large quantities and drank themselves; Gustau was not to touch the grapes on the hillside that would be pressed separately and stored for years for the finer vintage he had never tasted.

He was unloading the wagon with a bitterness his father would hope not transfer to the wine were he able to see. Gustau was the second son, he had been given a very good education and would have still more in the law school at Paris, and here he was, trusted only to unload the cheap grapes. His brother Joan was being groomed to inherit the farm, the idea being that Gustau would find some professional career and, after his father died, sell his share of the inheritance back to his brother. The additional lands had been acquired too carefully to admit a split so soon. Thus Gustau had been sent to school, Gustau would go to Paris to become a lawyer, and the family would do what it must to assure Gustau a fine career far from the ancestral lands. If one thought of the family holdings as ancestral lands – the phrase sounded far too noble for Gascon farmers but Gustau could think of no other. But Gustau was their son, not a hired labourer, and here he was, given the least worthy of the necessary work, his position undermined before he had even left. His father had said he needed someone trustworthy, and of physical strength, but that could be one person of importance, instead of Gustau and old Paire Arzac. He knew he was shunted aside from the very fact that he was off in the cuvier while Paire Arzac waited. The whole extended family came in to work on the vines alongside the hired labourers from the district, and Gustau was hefting grapes.

It was heavy work, shifting the grapes. They were round with water this year after heavier than average rains, which meant the wine would be dull, with a heavy minerality, though the quantity would be high. The berries were round and heavy with water, wanting to burst before their time, before the pressing began. They needed a careful touch to avoid being bruised and broken, spilling the precious juice into the dust, and it was with this task Gustau had been entrusted, though he refused to believe anyone with half a brain could possibly fail to see where undue pressure was being placed when stacking grapes in baskets, after all. He was seventeen, and in a month, he would be leaving home, probably forever. He had thought himself, when he returned home two months earlier, to be the hope of his family. Now, shifting the grapes, he felt about to enter into exile. Exiled already, really.

Back and forth, from the vineyards to the cuvier and back again, all morning long. The sun felt terribly hot – in Gascony, the harvest came at the end of summer, not at the beginning of autumn, and the heat was still intense at midday, particularly with all the physical exertion. The vines provided the little shade on the exposed hills, and the children brought lukewarm water and wine to the workers, the only relief coming from the evaporation of sweat on necks and foreheads. Even Paire Arzac was not protected in the least from the sun. He sat on the wagon seat, occasionally fanning himself with his broad straw hat. In the hottest portion of the day, the workers retreated to rest, there being no sign of rain that might hurry their efforts.

Gustau hid in the _chai_, the dark storeroom, among the aging barrels of wine. It was not any cooler than the house or any of the other outbuildings, but there was a heavy mustiness from mold and mushrooms and fermenting wine, so no one else had chosen to rest or nap there. Everyone else was at dinner, after which they would disperse around the farm to rest before returning to the vines. Gustau did not feel hungry, even after all the work, for the heat had taken care of that. He was merely tired, and bored, and bitter. He had come home for the harvest every year since he was sent to school in Toulouse, but this year he suddenly felt the unwanted guest in his own home. He was in the way, unaccomplished in the modes of country life, a city-dwelling French speaker thrown on the mercy of country relations until his fortunes might change. At some point in the past year, the boys of the locale had become men, or at least were treated as men, while he was treated as a boy still, or at least as a foreigner. Even when the war had ended two years ago, and the conscripts began trickling home, they were treated as men, members of society, welcomed back and given the position of men. He had only been away for ten months, and he was a boy, or a foreigner, someone who was dependent on others, while the other boys his age were treated as men, the future heads of families. He wanted nothing so much as to be back at school, where he knew the ropes, was one of the big ones and exerted power over the little boys, taunting them for their faltering French and country manners. Now he was the one taunted by his brother and cousins for how he held a knife and sometimes answered in French out of habit. Better to nap than to endure the jabs everyone else thought good-natured and he could only see as contempt.

The floor of the chai was hard-packed soil, trampled by generations working the grapes and unsoftened by any straw or even dust. Still, Gustau laid down in a corner, hiding behind a group of casks, his hat over his face to keep out the little light that came through the one window and open door and to keep off the flies. He might have dozed – he did not know – but he rarely fully slept anymore during the afternoon sieste. Naps were not on the schedule in Toulouse, no matter how hot the weather or how frequent the complaints of the local merchants' sons – their fathers might close shop for a couple hours in the heat of the day, but their minds could not afford such idleness. A smack of the cane and back to work, concentrate, the heat is only in your stupid, idle minds. The heat was perfectly real, of course, as was the drowsiness, but after seven years, it was hard to take drowsiness all the way to sleep, even after such a hard morning.

Eventually, Gustau sat up, resting his elbows on his knees. There was no point in counting down the days until he left. He was not even certain he wanted to leave. Even if he had spent seven years at school, he always came back here. Once he left for Paris, by design he would never see the family lands again. He would never see his parents again, or his brother or three sisters or the uncles and cousins that composed so much of the life of this country. A few of his school friends were going to Paris as well, but fully half of them were town boys, who had grown up in Toulouse and had ambitious fathers. Gustau's father was not so much ambitious as prudent, and Gustau knew it. If he had been the elder son, he would be staying at home, learning the land and the markets, instead of being sent away to seek his own fortune. If the law were different, he would not inherit any of the lands at all. So be it, then, he'd not want to inherit the land anyway. He'd been groomed for the life of the mind? Bring on the life of the mind, then, not the stagnation of the life of the country.

He was sitting sulking – he might have said brooding, but at seventeen, he was sulking – when his cousin Marcèra came looking for him, bearing a wineskin. She was his cousin in some roundabout way, as was every decent family in the region somehow at some distance, but she was close to his age and had started to turn rather pretty in the past year. He tried glaring at her for interrupting his reverie, but she merely offered him the wineskin.

The cheap red wine was warm and harsh where it hit the back of his palate. He could grow lightheaded from too much of it on an empty stomach, but Marcèra also produced a chunk of brown bread and some dried sausage. These tempted him out of the dark, musty chai back into the cuvier, bright with sunlight streaming through the windows. She sat down on the pressed dirt floor, bread and sausage in her lap, and with Gustau's knife cut pieces of sausage for them both. He was hungrier than he had realised and ate with relish. Marcèra used the wineskin with rather mannish skill, which impressed Gustau even as it annoyed him. He had been out of practice when he first returned and had caused much laughter over his faults. She did not pause to think before she squeezed a hefty stream into her mouth; it came to her naturally. But she had brought him something to sate his hunger and his thirst, and she made no conversation, which in itself was a blessing. He was tired of conversation about his education and prospects in which he always saw, veiled or overt, jabs at how his father had made a foreigner of him. They were all the more vexing because he saw the truth in them no matter how much he tried to deny it.

Marcèra brushed the crumbs out of her apron outside, to at least try to keep the rats and mice out of the grapes, but she left the wineskin with Gustau, who drank down several more large swallows before she returned. Had she been kind, or was this the way she expressed her contempt? he wondered. Did it even matter? The foreigner who did not debase himself deserved the contempt of the native for not knowing his place, and he had been doing a damned fine job of not knowing his place.

Gustau was never quite certain what propelled him, when she returned for the wineskin, to push her up against the wall of the cuvier and kiss her. Perhaps it was because he preferred her contempt to her kindness. Perhaps it was because she was a woman and a distant cousin and thus could be made to do something he wanted, just as he was forced to do only what the family wanted even as they taunted him for going along with it. Perhaps he was merely big enough to act on ideas that had percolated for a long time and he was finally alone with a girl. The reason did not matter in the end, or even in the moment. Marcèra made no resistance to his kiss. Nor did she resist when he cupped one of her pert breasts in his large hand. She showed no excitement, either – she merely permitted him to touch her however he wanted.

This very permissiveness was unexpected in a family member. The family was always so demanding. He fondled her breast for some time, untying her bodice so he could access the organ in all its glory, warm and white with a somewhat resistant softness, and she did not stop him. Indeed, she looked rather bored, and finally said in a tone that reminded him too much of his mother's tired chastisements of an evening, "Gustau, I'm not a cow for you to milk. Either do or don't, but we don't have all day."

It was the tone that pushed him to attention, the sense that he was making a child of himself and needed to prove otherwise. She was only his own age – it was hardly appropriate for her to tell him that he was wasting time. Even if she was permitted to stay on the land while he was forced into exile, he could at least make her, a girl, do something he wanted. His manhood primed by his explorations and affronted by her boredom, Gustau was fully alert to the possibilities inherent in the encounter. He knew the mechanics of what he might do, if humans and horses might be said to enjoy similar reproductive structures. Marcèra looked away while he raised her skirt, unbuttoned his trousers, and fumbled to push his rising prick inside her. With one hand, he guided his prick between her legs but bumped up against her anatomy several times before finally finding the entrance. She gave him no assistance or encouragement but her acquiescence, tamping down her lips when what might have been a pleasurable moan threatened to escape her throat. Gustau noted her stiffness and tried to exert his best efforts, but he had no experience on which to draw, since Marcèra was seemingly different from the cows and horses of the farm, their needs dictated by instinct alone. They were locked together now, her back to the rough wooden wall, the pale kerchief sliding further and further off her head with the friction, threatening to loose her dark hair at any moment. Her hips followed his, pulling back when he thrust forward and pushing forward when he pulled away, even as her hands were balled in her skirt and she looked to the side rather than at his face. Her cheeks flushed darkly as she withheld from him whatever emotion the act might otherwise have brought out, the excitement or the anger he believed he sought.

When at last he climaxed and went limp, she slid out of his grasp, wiped between her legs with her petticoat in a business-like manner, and shouldered the wineskin. "Is there anything else you need before they start again?" she asked, as if they had not copulated at all. The red had left her cheeks as quickly as it had come, and other than some disorder to her hair and scarf, there was no sign anything had happened.

"No," Gustau answered, confused. Had they not just shared a moment of intense instinct, even if not of love or hate or any strong human emotion? How could she walk away with a wineskin over her shoulder as if he were nothing? He was supposed to have taken something from her, wasn't that how it went? Made her do something. He stole back the wineskin and sent a stream into his cheek rather than his mouth, an embarrassing fumble he quickly corrected. Marcèra did not mock him for his trouble; she merely waited, hands on hips, for him to finish and hand it back. Even when she took a final drink herself, with the dexterity he lacked, Gustau could not see it as a mockery of him but merely the fact that she, too, needed a drink after their exertions. A sign of instinct, alone, since that was all that seemed to have driven her as they stood together. Women were perhaps not so different to cows after all – both looked at you with calm eyes with nothing behind them, making you think yourself an idiot.

"They'll be starting up again soon. My father wants you to get the wagon down to the lower vineyard." She slung the wineskin over her shoulder and left him standing in the chai, his trousers still open, feeling more like a foreign schoolboy than ever.


	4. Enjolras: Marseille, 1823

The August sun was high, bearing down on the hills and docks surrounding the harbour. It was near the end of the dinner hour, the labourers and foremen starting to trickle back from the low cafés near the water. Henri was balancing on a fractured crate, making a spectacle of which his friend Gérard was patently uneasy. It was not really a precarious position, nor was it such bad speech that even its originator find greater interest in checking his watch than listening to the delivery of his words, but Gérard had to be back at the Serre office up the hill far sooner than either he or Henri would like.

"And so, my brothers, we have a Charter, but what good is that to us? Neither King nor Chamber has any imagination. What can they do for you – or even for me – if they continue to see the third city in France as a backwater? We are the third city in France, growing by the day, but we might as well be the smallest fishing village. Very well, let us consider the smallest fishing village. Why are they so unworthy of attention, of respect? Marseille is no less Provençal than our neighbours, and we are no less French than Paris. If this is how we are to be governed, am I the only man who says 'Enough'? Enough that only the established is respected and the dynamic is ignored? Where are our steamboats and mills, our canals and industry? Why is our trade, our livelihood, denigrated by protectionist tariffs that favour Lyon and Lille? If we wanted our own schools, since we have been permitted only one royal college and no university, why is it so difficult for this king and this Chamber to deem them worthy of support? It is a paper king, a paper Chamber, and I will not support either if they do not support Marseille." Henri ripped in half the paper he had been brandishing to represent the Charter.

The gesture might have been more impressive had his audience consisted of more than five bored labourers, one of whom pointed and laughed, the commissaire de police for the district of the docks, a blind man pretending he was not begging for alms, and Gérard. Others had passed by, given him a brief glance, and moved on without even seeming to notice the CP standing in the shade, his arms folded, his eyes never moving from the boy speaking. Henri and Gérard had been at this off and on for several months, with the assistance of their friend Lemeire, and Marseille had never needed police warnings to promote indifference to their activities. At least that afternoon, only one man had bothered to laugh at them. When Henri stepped down off the crate, signaling an end to his remarks, the little audience scattered, the CP included. The speech had been given in fine rhetorical style, but it, as so many before, had won only mild ridicule.

"It was brilliant, really," Gérard stammered, but he was checking his watch again.

"You can tell me the truth."

An unfamiliar voice replied, "It was a beautiful speech." An unfamiliar female voice, which was even more surprising.

Henri turned and saw a girl. He was not certain which was more unusual – that a girl have paid attention to the speech to the extent that she dare talk to him, or that she was taller than Gérard. Her dress was a simple blue cotton print, and a few locks of light brown hair were visible under the open brim of her straw bonnet. Her bonnet's wide yellow ribbons were untied and streamed across her shoulders – broad shoulders, like a man or a laundress. Nevertheless, her features were even and, on a girl built on a smaller scale, might have been considered fine. Henri was rather taken aback by the thought she was – dare he consider it? – pretty.

It was not the first time he had noticed girls looking at him, of course. His father had sent him to a couple of parties already, horrifically boring affairs at which he was expected to learn to dance and make small talk with girls who stared at him and either grew voluble over the most trivial details or completely tongue-tied. But this girl did not look at him in the quite the way other girls did, and that was a relief.

Henri feared he was rather staring at her instead of she at him, and he quickly thanked her for the compliment. "My name is Henri Enjolras," he introduced himself, "and this is my friend, Marc Gérard." Gérard was checking his watch again. A pretty girl stood in front of him, and Gérard was more concerned about being late back to work. Lemeire would not have cared about work were he here today, Henri was certain.

"Emilie Duchamp," she replied in a very friendly, straightforward manner. How nice that a girl was neither obsequious nor swooning upon hearing his name.

"Did you really like the speech?" His heart was pounding very strangely – he almost feared what she might say, if he could even hear it above the rush of blood in his ears.

"It was a beautiful speech," she repeated. "It would have been a better speech had you not kept citing last month's bread prices."

Henri looked to Gérard, but Gérard was already walking swiftly away, back to work. He relied on Gérard for these things. He had a staff of servants, Lemeire's family kept a couple of maids, but Gérard's father was a grocer, for heaven's sake.

"Too low?" he asked in embarrassment.

"Yesterday hit 12 sous for the standard two kilo loaf. Rumour has it that Paris hit 14 two weeks ago."

"I'm sorry that my mistake comes at such a cost."

She laughed merrily, which both embarrassed him and drew him to her. Julien Combeferre was the only one who dared laugh at him, and Julien was in Paris, probably not to return before beginning medical studies in November. "Please forgive me," she apologised. "You didn't mean to make such an awful pun, monsieur."

He found himself smiling a bit at that, however. He had not even realised the pun he had made. "Other than my figures, the speech pleased you?"

"Oh, yes," she replied with great excitement. "You've no idea how happy it makes me to hear someone agree with my father."

"Your father?"

"Duchamp the blacksmith?" She saw it meant nothing to him, so she explained, "Either you are new to Marseille or your people pay even less attention to our people than we thought. In the great and glorious year 1792, my uncle marched north with the volunteers of the armée du Midi to defend the Republic. My father was still a boy then, but he tried to follow. He never did get to go to war – my uncle died at Vosges. But Marseille can be such a small town at times – everyone seems to remember everything, particularly how when Bonaparte came in, it was not at all to my father's liking. He much preferred the Republic. This government has just depressed him. But now there's you!" she exclaimed brightly. "Perhaps our generation will get it figured out correctly."

"Our generation?"

"To which do you object? The generation or my inclusion in it? You don't have to say it." Henri was unsure what she thought he was going to say, if he could say anything at all – he could not form words at the moment. "But a woman can think and write and speak. Mme de Staël. Olympe de Gouges."

"Yes, yes, of course." There was his tongue.

"Do you need an assistant?" It was not an eager, childish inquiry, as might be expected from a girl who fancied him, but a serious business proposition. A proposition that was indeed tempting, as Gérard had not kept up his end, and it would mean seeing this Mlle Duchamp much more often.

"I believe I could use your help, yes. We're meeting tonight, in fact."

"Which café?"

Only when she asked did he realise they stuck to rather rough and cheap cafés, places where the only women were the prostitutes Lemeire ogled, to Henri's constant annoyance. But they were painted tarts, nothing like Mlle Duchamp. "Where shall you be comfortable? I will bring them to you," he added with a gallantry he had never felt before in his life.

"Rousseau's," she replied, which was rather surprising. Rousseau had a mixed class clientele because he managed to get a good supply of the leftist newspapers and pamphlets from Paris, but Henri had never noticed women in there.

"Sometime after eight o'clock?"

"Very good. Until tonight, monsieur."

"No, you mustn't call me 'monsieur' if you are to join us," Henri found himself insisting. "If we must use titles, then it can only be 'citizen'."

He felt very warm, not with embarrassment but with something akin to pleasure when she replied, "Very well. Until tonight, citoyen."

Watching her walk away, he could see a grace and strength in the way she moved, a delicate force in each step. A pagan might deem her Gaia, the original mother goddess, the earth itself, and therefore Henri was certain he had found the human incarnation of Marianne. Beauty, yes, but with strength mixed in her feminine grace. How could an aristocrat in a salon, or a loose artist's model, possibly compare to a blacksmith's daughter, this perfect child of the people? Yet when he informed Gérard and Lemeire that they were decamping for Rousseau's because he had found France herself, he was surprised to hear Gérard tell Lemeire, "Don't get your hopes up. She's Duchamp's daughter. Looks like him, too." They both settled down after Henri gave them a look, but he could not even identify why he felt a pall had been thrown over the evening before it had even begun.

Henri felt uneasy when they entered Rousseau's. There was no caution in meeting at Rousseau's – every leftist in Marseille met there under the watchful eyes of the police. But there were other women, Henri realised for the first time, and there were the newspapers, with which Mlle – Citoyenne – Duchamp was more conversant than Gérard. Henri thawed considerably in her presence. It was not merely that she quickly proved better read than either Gérard or Lemeire, with an excellent memory; she also had the sort of penetrating and analytical mind that Julien Combeferre in particular would appreciate. If the others got little from the meeting, Henri did not notice. He had eyes and ears only for Citoyenne Duchamp. When, after a full week of meetings, both with the group and the two of them alone with the newspapers at Rousseau's, she permitted him to walk her home, he understood that he was to meet her celebrated father.

Gérard had lied – Emilie was hardly the image of her father. Her hair was straight and bordering on fair; his was dark and curly. But she did seem less out of place standing next to her tall and muscular parent. Here was her physical scale; if Antaeus had descendants, they had certainly come to ground here in Massalia, not giants anymore but people of size and force and earthbound strength. The peasants were too small to count, later additions from lesser stock. In the Duchamps, one could see the Frenchmen the little provincials ought to be. It was even a point of pride to M. Duchamp that his family spoke French at home.

M. Duchamp was intimidating, with his size and dark complexion and the huge hammer in his hand, until he suddenly grinned and set aside his tools, crushing Henri's hand in a firm handshake. "So you're the young man who dares to say what's what. If I ever tried it again, they'd have me under arrest before I could say 'Down with privilege'. You have to do it when you're young, before you've got a wife and children to support." Henri considered saying that he had no plans for a wife or children, but he decided it best to hold his tongue. "How far we have fallen. We were great once. Now look at us. If I were permitted to vote, the Chamber would look very different."

"Papa, what if he were a police spy?" Emilie joked.

"What if I were a police spy?" M. Duchamp ragged back. "If he keeps you late any more often, your mother will start to bemoan your reputation."

"I have only the most honourable of intentions toward your daughter, monsieur," Henri insisted defensively.

"He's only joking," Emilie explained. "My reputation is already awful. I'm a bluestocking and a republican – and I don't even like to go to church," she added in a stage whisper. "Mother expects me in the kitchen, so I shall say goodbye to you now before she thinks me ever further down the path of unmarriageability. Until tomorrow, citoyen."

But that left Henri alone with her father, who took him by the shoulder into a corner of the smithy. "Your intentions are honourable?"

"How could they be otherwise?" Henri asked in confusion.

"If you are not a fool, monsieur, you know the game as well as I. I thought Emilie safe from it, but there's no accounting for what your sort do when stuck in Marseille. Her reputation is my reputation, or perhaps I should say that my reputation is her reputation, but if it deteriorates, it will be on your head, and you will accept the consequences of your actions. Do I make myself clear, monsieur?"

It was not entirely clear to Henri, but he did not wish to seem a fool. "Her reputation is of the highest consideration. I should hope that all of us conduct ourselves honourably. If we succeed in making a second revolution, we cannot afford for our detractors to latch onto our faults."

"A second revolution," M. Duchamp mused reverently. "How I hope I shall see it. When the time comes, you may count on me. If we have Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, they'll have a devil of a time taking the country back."

Henri felt as if he had dodged the firing squad, that there had been something inappropriate in his attachment that he had managed to push aside. If Emilie's father permitted her to continue to meet with the little group, then this nervousness and heightened sensation Henri sometimes felt in her presence could only be acceptable. Indeed, when Julien managed to come for three weeks at the end of September, Henri was relieved to discover that much of what he felt in Emilie's presence was merely the warmth of friendship he had with Julien.

There was a remainder, however, that rather concerned him. Julien agreed that she had her attractions, and indeed, he quickly became rather friendly with her himself, to Henri's annoyance. He had to tell himself daily that Julien was leaving soon enough, that once he began the term in November, there was no telling when they might see each other again. He refused to dignify this annoyance with the name of "jealousy", but that idea gnawed at him whenever the three of them were together and Julien was holding court on some topic that he knew better from his time in the capital, Emilie hanging on his every word. Julien was even permitted to meet M. Duchamp and his wife, an honour he seemed to appreciate as he treated them with a particular courtesy that, in Henri's experience, he usually reserved for M. Combeferre's business acquaintances.

Yet when Julien at last left, and they embraced as usual, it was very pleasant, if a little embarrassing, to hear Julien whisper, "Congratulations, brother. If only we all could find such perfection."

Because when Lemeire left not long after, to begin legal studies at Aix, his goodbye was both similar in sentiment and terribly vulgar. "If you haven't had her yet, you'd better before I come back at Easter." The statement was accompanied by a leer and some vulgar gestures that the rational part of Henri's brain knew Lemeire meant in fun but a trace of emotion thoroughly resented.

He had known Emilie for nearly three months, and even as lately he had known he was getting far too attached to her, particularly when he permitted her to brush his hair out of his eyes, he had never contemplated even kissing her, much less what Lemeire demonstrated with hand gestures. There was no call to treat a woman with such contempt.

Henri wrote to Julien. "It has been suggested that I ought to have bedded Citoyenne Duchamp before now. But such actions are the furthest thing from my mind when I am with her. When I see any woman. She is the incarnation of everything that is good in France, the strength and intelligence and courage and even beauty that is our country, our people. The most perfect representative of what we ought to be. How could I even contemplate sullying such purity with the most base of ordinary human desires?"

But Julien at last wrote back, "Dear brother, this is the illness for which there is no cure. You are in love, and how could you not be? Who other than the epitome of France would be a worthy partner for you? I wish you joy, and patience. There is more of love in honour than there is in lust, I am sure of it, but it is not much respected. Nine years you shall have to wait, unless we can overturn the marriage laws sooner. But what is patience when there is perfection to be had in the end? I am terribly happy for you, and perhaps even a little jealous. But there is no flaw in not taking a girl to bed. The only girls who go to bed before their wedding nights are the girls who are used poorly, considered lightly, and thrown aside when men have taken their own needs, with no thought for the girls themselves. You will be a greater man than others someday because you refuse to engage in hypocrisies. I would love you less if you had already bedded her, had used her for base desires when she is obviously worth so much more. Any girl is worth better than to be used and shoved aside, but Mlle Duchamp is worth far more than an ordinary girl. It is a pity she is a girl, but then, were she a man, she could never partner you."

In love? But that seemed a hypocrisy, too. Henri had not bedded her, not even kissed her, not even contemplated kissing her. He had never thought about it until he had been told that he should. There was no connection between the emotional and the physical. When others at school would exchange stories of lurid dreams and intense desires, he had understood the physical response yet had never been able to share the emotional causes. He had learned from those moments that he was not like other boys; that he was not even like Julien, when it came down to it in a single nervous conversation late one summer night. Julien began to ask what other boys would ask, and Henri, unable to lie to him, shut down the entire line of thought. The body and the mind enjoyed total separation, a separation he was ordinarily proud of. In Emilie's presence, there were times his head would seem to whirl and her voice to echo as every thought but her presence was stripped away, but these were tricks of the mind, he was certain. The body, blamed perhaps unfairly for so many other men's emotions, had no role. And Julien had not understood at all – how could he really? – yet he had put some rather nice thoughts into Henri's head. Not that there ought to be a wedding night, for that was merely the usage of a woman by her husband for his own pleasures, but that there ought to be a full partnership, something eternal, or at least for a lifetime. Was that love, and the other, the desire for kisses and more, merely animal lust, something base and undeserving? He had been aware enough, or lucky enough, to avoid mingling the two. Unless they were meant to be mingled, and that was why everyone else combined them? If Julien could not understand, who could?

In the end, it was Emilie herself who understood. Just after Christmas, in the midst of a two day mistral that had her holding her bonnet onto her head, her cloak gathered about her as tightly as the frigid wind would allow, she burst into Rousseau's, her red cheeks dimpled slightly as she laughed at the wind that tried to blow her away. "It's a horrid night out there. My hands are frozen!" She permitted him to attempt to warm her hands in his, but he suddenly realised that he was behaving with all the hypocrisy of the lover but in the other direction. He dropped her hands as swiftly as he had taken them in the first place.

She did not let on if she minded. "Has he got in the latest _Constitutionnel_?"

"Mademoiselle," Henri began, not really looking at her. He had put it off too long, he knew.

"Oh, you are serious. Go on."

"It has come to my attention that some people believe me in love with you." It was very strange to say the words aloud.

"Are you?"

"I don't know," he found himself answering, which was perhaps more honest than the straight denial he had intended to give.

"Well, you're not. You have known me coming up on six months, and you haven't once tried to kiss me."

"Did you want me to?"

"I don't expect you to. My father's a blacksmith, and I'm plain as anything. Why should I want something so ridiculous as a kiss from the rich and very handsome Henri Enjolras?" The familiar teasing note in her voice was there when she complimented him, but her words seemed very serious.

"Why should it be so ridiculous?"

"Because it is not who you are," she began, but then she corrected, "no, it is not in your nature. You don't look at me as if you'd like to take me to bed, and really, who would? Certainly none of the chaps who've tried to practise on me, sweating bullets and almost afraid I'll take them up on the offer. You don't even look at me the way they do, practising on the plain girl what they haven't the courage to try with the pretty ones. Who has been saying such things, anyway?"

"It doesn't matter. I have the greatest respect for you, mademoiselle, and I would hope that I would never conduct myself in such a manner that our relations be put into question."

"Oh, but they will be," she said frankly. "Perhaps that will send my share price up, some sense that you find something of worth in me. No one else has done."

"What a terrible thing to say."

"But it is true."

"Then I shall have to kiss you, to prove it false."

He had not intended it as a joke – it was a serious declaration of intent – but she laughed. "I don't need pity. You look at me as you look at M. Combeferre. And I must say I enjoy being taken seriously. But you are not in love with either one of us."

"I feel something more for you than I feel for Julien," he admitted. His heart was beating terribly fast, but then, the heart was not the only organ in the body. His palms were moist, but one could easily attribute that to the fear brought on by the entire conversation being held in a crowded café. These were hardly the signs that accompanied boys' fantastical descriptions of shapely female ankles and damp bodices. A physical response, perhaps, but not the physical response expected even from the truth he had just admitted.

With a serious expression, she took his hand in both of hers. "I fear I care more for you than I ought, and I should think after twenty years of life, I should know what is permitted my sort of people and your sort of people. I hope for great things in your future, that you ought to be a great man someday. And the greatest pleasure of my life would be, not that you tried to make love to me, but that you took me seriously. The one would be out of pity, and we both know it, but the other is out of the deepest respect, taking into consideration all of our differences, male and female, bourgeois and working class."

"I know I care for you more than I ought," he admitted.

"And that is respect. I'm more grateful for it than I can say. But don't let's confuse it with love. Shouldn't love carry with it the desire for something more than sitting across a table, sharing the latest news from Paris? Respect, partnership, understanding – the things that can be between men and so often are overlooked between men and women. Let us promise each other these alone and not bring physical attraction and therefore inappropriate and unkind thoughts of love into it."

"I do think you beautiful. There could be no more perfect symbol of France than you."

But then she laughed, breaking the spell which had grown more and more tense as they went on. "Well, there you are. How could you possibly have fallen in love with me when your heart belongs to France? I want only what you can give, and I ask for no more. We should respect each other less were anything else the case. Has Rousseau got the new issue of the _Constitutionnel_?"

That night, alone in bed, Henri realised a weight had been lifted. To be thought in love, when one was not certain of what love was or if one was even capable of love, had been a terrible strain. But respect, partnership, and understanding – these he understood, in these he did not feel himself deficient, and these he could give gladly to someone as worthy as Emilie Duchamp.


	5. Joly: Paris, 1826

Paris was not Toulouse, and Thomas thanked God for it. But neither was Paris Bordeaux. Toulouse had been too insular, the girls chattering away in their own dialect, laughing at the Bordelais and their strange tongue, though the Occitan was not so different to the Bordelais, really. But Paris, like Bordeaux, was composed of men and women from all over Europe, and a man with an accent stood out less than a man who sounded native.

Paris had other benefits, too. Thomas had been attached to the law faculty at Toulouse, a doubtful experiment when begun and an abject failure when ended. While it had been a good idea that one of the sons should become a lawyer, Thomas, like his elder brother Philippe, had not had the temperament for it. They had inquisitive enough minds, but both had a scientific bent. Philippe had returned home after less than a year and gone to work for their uncle Barton, but Thomas felt he must make a stronger try. He stuck it out to fail his first-year examinations twice, the second time perhaps because he gave up his afternoons to every lecture offered by the faculty of sciences. Legal statutes had a tendency to fragment, portions flying out of his brain entirely, but medical terms, the parts of the body and the most interesting diseases that professors attempted to direct at the advanced students in the lecture hall, had the same staying power as the organization of the animal and vegetable kingdoms into orders and species.

There were six children in the house in the cours du Chapeau Rouge. Opinions differed as to whether that was too high a number: Thomas would have said it was just enough, a perfect match of three boys and three girls, but M. Joly had to finance three dowries and set up three sons out of a single wine export firm. Thomas might go to Paris after his failure in Toulouse, but only if he would put his nose to the grindstone and study hard for a profession. To do less would be to take more than his share of the family resources.

He did not feel directly out of place in Paris, as there was too great a variety of people for any one person to stand out, but he did feel unprepared among the student population. Bordeaux was a workaday town, and his dull coats and practical trousers left him feeling countrified and out of place among so many of the older students. One could tell at a glance which students required a profession and which students were permitted to study for one. A quick letter home left no doubt in M. Joly's mind that Paris had not changed at all from his youth – one must still cut a dash or be seen as provincial, it appeared, and he well-remembered the feeling of going to a tailor to have a bright blue coat with very wide lapels. "One new coat and two waistcoats ought to set up you up well enough," he wrote back, sending enough money that Thomas was also able to buy himself a silver-headed cane. He could at least look like a Parisian now, so long as he did not open his mouth, or at the very least like a man of property. He needed every possible advantage, he was sure, for how could anyone take a skinny, ginger student seriously? Particularly as he was starting all over, having failed at his studies before.

After the first month or so, Thomas could present himself as well as could be expected. But on the whole, Paris threatened failure for rather different reasons than Toulouse. Strangely, it was too quiet. Thomas easily enough grew friendly with the men who shared his corpse that first winter, and they were far better companions than his friends from the _collège royal_ who had accompanied him to Toulouse, but a single room shared with no one, and the dinner table shared with grasping clerks, were hardly comparable to family life. Six children had made for a boisterous household, and when Thomas had left for Toulouse, all the children had still been at home. Even upon his return, with Philippe decamped for permanent residence at the Château Langoa and Marguerite preparing for her wedding, four children would still make a noisy dinner table. Indeed, Thomas had been the quiet one of the family for much of his life, the pale, thin, ginger one among otherwise dark and sturdy Bordelais and Basque and Irish stock. But while men told tales of rowdy students, he had always managed to find himself in quiet, if not serious, garnis.

"I don't see why you cannot come out with us," Magny argued a bare month into their acquaintance, ignoring the half-flayed arm before him for more important matters.

"I'll end up locked out."

"You, my good man, need a better place to live," Fromme insisted, pointing with his scalpel.

"And can a man really change lodgings before the end of the quarter?"

"You're good and stuck until the new year," Magny was forced to admit. "Too bad – we're headed to the Chaumière on Sunday night."

"What's so exciting about the Chaumière?"

"Best girls in Paris," Picot told him. "Chap at my lodgings says so."

"Perhaps I can catch you up another time." But Thomas was not sorry to have an excuse to turn down the invitation. The girls in Toulouse had been bad enough with their giggling every time he opened his mouth. The maids back home had been bad enough, too, in their way, often in country superstition blaming him as a malevolent spirit when they sought to give notice because one of the other children had managed to climb up to the roof and pour water down the chimney on the bonne's afternoon out. Thomas did not need Parisian girls to laugh at his Bordeaux accent and red hair, even if they might be sophisticated enough to have set aside ridiculous provincial stories.

Yet he had no other occupations of an evening. His friends from school had taken to cards and women from their arrival in Toulouse, even as the women laughed at them. They called it flirtatious, but Thomas was certain he knew better. One café permitted them to use the billiard table, and he alone found more pleasure in the table than in the girl behind the zinc counter. The table could be mastered, all the faults his own and able to be smoothed out with practice, while the girl permitted only the vaguest familiarities, the faults either in her or uncorrectable in himself. At least Paris provided other amusements of an evening when one was able to set aside the books: there were botanical and zoological lectures at the Jardin des Plantes, more elaborate chemical experiments at the faculty of sciences than he had ever seen in Toulouse, and if one managed one's time well, a Sunday afternoon at the zoological gardens could be had, all for nothing. The only occupations in Toulouse had been gaming and women and one theatre; Paris had enough science to satisfy him as well as plenty of theatres. If one wanted women, one could much more easily see the ballet girls in appreciative peace in any of one of the eleven theatres of Paris. The low décolletage and the short skirts provided a far better view of womanly charms for far less money, all things considered, than attempting to seduce a girl at a dance hall. Particularly when one was a skinny, ginger-haired Bordelais, Thomas was certain.

But Magny in particular continued to harangue him to change his lodgings, and as the new year began, Thomas found himself installed in another garni, around the corner from Magny. "I thought my neighbour might be leaving," he apologised, "but it seems he managed to pay the next quarter after all. This will do you just as well, though." The new lodgings cost an extra five francs a month, a full sixty francs a year more, but Thomas justified the expense in the need to have his own key, particularly if he were to get an _externat_ the following year. "It would be easiest to remain in one place, convenient to the major hospital, for the entire four years, would it not?" he wrote. M. Joly did not increase Thomas' allowance, but he did accept the change of address.

Fromme had a dinner ticket for the place, though he maintained what he called a private apartment, so that Thomas' time was no longer much his own. The corner café was Magny and Fromme's usual haunt, and Picot often descended on it rather than on his local. Sharing a dinner table every night with Fromme, and a local café with the lot, meant that Thomas no longer had an excuse the next time they dared venture to the Chaumière.

"You must come. It hardly costs a thing, and the girls are willing. And pretty," Picot added, more as an afterthought.

Thomas had very low expectations as he allowed them to drag him through the gates. A dusting of snow lay on the ground of the pleasure garden, though the paths had been swept. The bare trees glittered in the lantern light, but at least the dance hall itself was fully enclosed, brightly lit, and looked warm in the winter landscape. He would have no entertainment, he felt sure, but at least he would be warm.

The hall appeared to be crowded with all the most imperious café girls in Paris. Dark and fair, they all seemed to look him up and down then turn away, unimpressed by this latest arrival. Thomas knew better than to delude himself – his mother might suggest his hair had at last darkened to brown, but it was merely less violently red than it had been in his childhood. He would always be pale, and the combination of pallor and his thin frame had been the cause of many visits by the doctors in his youth, many days spent in bed on the top floor of the house in the cours du Chapeau Rouge, watching what might happen in the windows across the way. All his vitality had gone into his height, the doctors had suggested, and he had never filled out properly. The prettiest girls were all with substantial men, men who were no more handsome than he but were, he understood, the picture of health. But no one had yet laughed at him, as if he were not even important enough for that much attention, and unlike in Toulouse, he could perhaps spend an evening nursing several drinks and watching the more appropriate couples pair off and break up, the girls' shoulders beautifully white in the candlelit room.

"Go on, do what you want," Thomas insisted to his friends. "You've got the hang of the place already. Just let me watch for a bit. It's all I want, I swear."

Too nervous to do anything else, watching was a comfort. Thomas could drink and take in the haze, the colours, the smell of liquor and bodies and perfume, and try not to think of how much he did not belong. As an observer, he did not have to belong. His friends had quickly found girls for themselves – Fromme was even now on the dance floor, his arm around a brunette who, while hardly the prettiest girl in the room, was far better dressed and coiffed than any girl Thomas had seen in Toulouse – and he could watch them with true enjoyment. He stood back and fiddled idly with his cane, content that he had not yet made the evening a disaster. It was the most he dared hope for.

Yet soon enough, a girl had come up to him. A very pretty blonde girl, far prettier than Fromme's brunette, and the look in her bright eyes had none of the mockery he expected.

"Do you dance, monsieur?"

"Are you asking me to dance?" he asked in confusion. It was certainly backwards, wasn't it, that the girls do the asking? Paris was not at all like Toulouse.

"Yes." She took him by the hand and he had no choice but to take her out onto the dance floor. "You can call me Céleste."

"Thomas." It was hard to pronounce words in her presence – he was so certain that he would make a fool of himself.

"Pleasure to meet you."

The dance was of a sort he had not seen before – they danced differently in Paris, or at least the young and poor did, than did the bourgeois of Bordeaux. He followed as best he could, but he feared he was making a terrible spectacle of himself. He spent much of his time looking at his feet, trying to avoid stepping on Céleste's dainty blue shoes. His lessons had not prepared him for this sort of dancing in this sort of crowd. Céleste laughed at him, her blonde curls shaking, but he did not mind for once. The humour in her seemed to be natural rather than at his expense, as if she would laugh at anything, even the most handsome man in the room dancing with all style and grace. He had never noticed girls like this.

At least he had the presence of mind to offer to buy her something to drink, and she had the delightful audacity to ask for champagne. It was a thoroughly inferior vintage, probably some fifth pressing for local consumption he was surprised had even been shipped to Paris, but he did not mind when examining her bright eyes over the rim of the glass as they chatted of the weather and his friends and how he found the Chaumière.

"I suppose you must be a seamstress?" Thomas dared ask as he feared, having exhausted what he could think to say further about his friends, his end of the conversation was flagging.

"Who isn't? Paris goes through a great many shirts and handkerchiefs." She laughed again – it seemed she was always laughing. "I do embroidery on ladies' gowns," she added. It suited her better, Thomas thought, the idea of bright colours rather than the stale pallor of linen.

"I came here as a maid, if you can believe it," she went on. "I suppose you were horrid to your servants." But it was a flirtatious tease, not an accusation, and Thomas felt more eager than defensive.

"I tried to be perfectly nice," he insisted, "but with six of us children, we never could keep staff long."

"Six! I should have hated you all! All boys, I suppose, too."

"Only three. But my sisters were no better." Indeed, Lili was the best climber of the six and took every opportunity to show away, even now that she had reached the age of fourteen.

Céleste seemed to enjoy hearing of his family because she asked, "And do your brothers look like you?"

"Not at all," Thomas was forced to admit. His brothers were darker and far more handsome, he was sure.

Céleste turned out to have two older brothers. "They spend all of their time arguing over the land, and I wasn't to have any portion to marry on, so can you blame me for getting out there?" She went on for a bit in this vein – her family, it seemed, were not so nice as Thomas'. But it had been only a short relief to her to come to Paris. "Why should I scrub and scrape my life away and have nothing to show for it but a baby? I speak of what might have been, not what is," she added reassuringly. "If I'm to have a man's hands all over me, I should like to have liberty to choose the man. And you have very nice hands." She giggled as Thomas flushed at the compliment.

"Shall we have another dance?" Thomas dared ask. It seemed it would be easier than continuing the conversation, particularly if she did indeed think he had nice hands. But even after a second dance, which he performed no better than the first but with rather more joy, she stood by him all the evening, chatting about the Chaumière and her friends, a bit more about the medical school and his friends.

Thomas cared more for her bright eyes and the lovely sound of her voice than for the actual subject of her conversation, and he was fairly certain she cared nothing for what he could say of the medical school. The idea that she liked him was perhaps more intoxicating than the bitter champagne. When at last she left to rejoin her friends, a giggling flock of terribly pretty girls, he felt very lightheaded indeed.

Picot slapped him on the shoulder on their way out, congratulating him on his conquest. "Prettiest girl in the hall, damn you."

Céleste was not the prettiest girl in the hall, Thomas tried to argue, but she was very pretty, indeed, and more than that, she was as bubbly as the champagne she had so enjoyed. Her voice carried over the din of the hall the way the foam would carry over the edge of the glass.

Thomas met her several more times at the Chaumière – indeed, he kept going to the Chaumière precisely in order to meet her. His dancing never improved, but how could it when he would rather keep his eyes on Céleste rather than the movements of the more accomplished dancers? It was best on the rare occasions, perhaps only twice in an evening, when the band would play a waltz, and he could take her in his arms and twirl her around the room, he and she perfectly in step and made only for each other.

It was after a waltz that she asked if he would walk her home. As a gentleman, of course he agreed, though his heart was racing, not at all knowing what she might want. The spring night was chill, though the sharpness of winter had gone. She kept her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders even as she leaned close to Thomas. He could not feel her warmth through his coat, but he felt the delightful pressure of her bosom against his arm.

Céleste lived on the fifth floor, the very top, of a house not far from his own lodgings, a small garret with a bed, a chair, and a table, and a sloping roof. Thomas thought to bid her goodnight, but she kissed him full on the lips instead.

This was where the novels skipped to a new chapter, he thought. He knew his anatomy, but his thoughts were not at all of the physical logistics. Instead, he shut the door and pulled her down onto her bed, conscious of nothing but the feel of her lips, the tug of her fingers on his cravat, the sudden loosening of her thick blonde hair so that, before he even realised he was nearly naked, he was buried in a glorious flood of gold.

Céleste had ideas that Thomas only later learned were perhaps not quite the done thing. She preferred to lower herself onto his cock, her firm little breasts bouncing in delight to a background of her golden hair. She could pull him up to where they were both sitting, with him still buried inside her, to caress and kiss and feel as much flesh against flesh as was possible. The only thing she would not do was lay on her own back and let him push into her. It was rather like living in that dirty pamphlet his friend Macard had once brought to school and been soundly beaten over by both the headmaster and his father for such audacity. Thomas had not understood the dirty pamphlet then, and he considered it now a shameful thing, a poor replacement for the actual touch of flesh, the burning in the brain that accompanied the rising cock, the sight of a beautiful girl naked and taking you places not even the pamphlet could explain.

When at last he came, with a shudder that he thought must be his spirit leaving his worn out body, expelled with his seed, he felt limp all over. Céleste lay across him for a moment, flesh to flesh, a delightful feeling but one he could not sustain in his fatigue. It was an effort to him to stroke her hair, her soft, beautiful hair.

"I like redheads," she told him softly, almost in the tone of a child admitting someone else's secret. "You're all so bright, so much excitement and energy that some of it must come out through your hair. You're always so brilliant in bed."

Thomas flushed darkly. He would never dare explain to her that she was the first, that he had merely followed the enticing lead she set, just as he had done ever since they had met. And he knew, from her tone, that she was praising him, that he was not the exception to her rule. He knew she must feel the increasing heat, and he could only escape rather than endure explanations.

Escape was her intent as well, however, it seemed, which was more chilling to him than the damp March night. "Do be a dear and let yourself out. You've simply exhausted me." He dressed quickly, uncertain if he should be upset at being asked to leave or relieved that he could make his escape. "I will see you again, won't I?" she asked.

"Of course." He kissed her good night, his lips catching at hers, lengthening a peck into a slow caress. Decending the stairs, he barely noticed the gentleman in the tall hat he passed on the fourth-floor landing.

His breath hung in the thick air on the midnight walk back to his lodgings, but the only thing Thomas noticed was the rush of thought. When might he see her again? Paris was not at all like Toulouse, nor was it like Bordeaux. It was so much better than anything he had yet experienced. What did past failures matter in a place where something could, indeed, go right at last? He could make a go of this venture after all.


	6. Prouvaire: Alais, 1822

Jean's mother had declined considerably in the three weeks since Christmas. His father had declined, too, though M. Prouvaire's health was never in question. Mme Prouvaire's bed had been moved downstairs into the salon, the bedrooms having neither fireplaces nor stoves, and it was certain she would never get out of it again.

Jean passed the days sitting at his mother's bedside, talking or reading to her in the moments when she was awake, but often merely holding her hand as she slept fitfully. He could not remember a time when his mother had been well, but even he could tell that she was finally on the last steps of her wearying road.

His mother's bedside was a difficult enough place for a boy of his gentle temperament; his father's company made the long days seem even longer. School was terrible, particularly as the boys in the top year had decided he was pretty as a girl, therefore he ought to take that role among them, but home was worse. The vacation in September coincided with the grape harvest, when his father was busy enough to ignore him or at least engage him solely in the business aspects of their holdings. But now it was winter, when the arrondissement did not give the subprefect enough business to occupy his entire day, so M. Prouvaire was at home more often than Jean would have preferred. He spent little time with his dying wife, and she never let on to Jean what her feelings on that score may have been. Jean suspected she was relieved. He could not imagine that his gruff father had been any sort of match to his delicate mother, and now her trials were finally coming to an end.

When he had been sent to school at the age of ten, his mother had knelt before him, telling him, "Keep your head down, and do whatever they ask. Pay as much attention as you must in what passes for religious education, take communion when they permit you to, and never let on that you may profess something different. We will see what happens on the other side." At school in Avignon, he sat in catechism classes and took communion like all the Catholic boys. At home in Alais, his mother read him the Bible in French while his father complained that she was ruining the boy's prospects. The Restoration had given him the subprefecture at Alais, a complete though welcome surprise, and while a Protestant family was not legally barred from position anymore, the lines were continually fluctuating. The cantons surrounding Alais had a Protestant majority, thus M. Prouvaire's nomination, but it was not a large majority. He was in for the moment, but one breath the wrong way would send him out again. M. Prouvaire had grown up keeping his head down, just as his wife had instructed their son, going through the motions of Catholicism when necessary, trying to profess very little of anything publicly.

In private, however, M. Prouvaire professed everything, generally beginning and ending with his dissatisfaction with his son. Jean could do nothing about the fact that he took after his mother, small and delicate and, as the boys at school had noted, pretty as a girl. He did his best to pay attention to his father and do as his father wanted, but it was so much easier to let his mind wander, to drift with the clouds rather than mind the minutia of grape quality, a task rather hard for any sixteen year old, even one less dreamy than Jean. He was more interested in the people than in the produce, the hired labourers who picked the grapes and shook the olives and stripped the mulberry trees for the silkworms, the families who rented land from his grandfather and paid their rent in kind, the men he saw come to see his father seeking a passport or to register the birth of a child or the death of one. But M. Prouvaire took note of that interest, saw it mixed with cloud gazing and dreaming, and called him effeminate and a disgrace. School was supposed to toughen him up, keep him away from the unfortunate example of his weak mother. Charity was for women; business was for men.

But now his mother was dying, and Jean sat by her bedside, reading selections from the Bible or inventing stories from school that made his days there sound happier than they were. The bruise on his cheek that he had been given when he refused to acknowledge another boy's attentions had faded now, and Jean even rather wanted to return. The alternative, to stay with his father after his mother finally passed on, was unimaginable. He had learned perfectly well to keep his head down, even at home, but there was a difference between adolescent boys he would never have to see again after he sat his bac in June and his father. Occasionally he dared to recite a poem to his mother – he enjoyed writing poetry, the discipline imposed by meter soothing to his often troubled soul – but he usually lapsed into one of the Psalms instead, for fear his father would overhear. His mother preferred the Psalms anyway, being so close to meeting the Lord.

The only other life in the house were the two servants – the old cook who had been with them since Jean was a child, and Suzanne, the new housemaid. She had been hired after Jean had returned to school in October, a strange figure to him when he returned only two months later to sit at his mother's bedside. She could sometimes be heard humming or even singing as she went about her work if M. Prouvaire were out. If M. Prouvaire were in, she was silent as a mouse. It was the habit of the house to be silent when M. Prouvaire was in.

In the late winter afternoon, the rays of sun very yellow among the long purple shadows, Jean sat at the bottom of the garden. What the latest row with his father – his father's row with him, really – had been did not matter; they were all the same row. Jean was disappointed in himself, that he could not make his father happy, even if his father did not seem to understand that he was still more child than man, a schoolboy who should have been reading philosophy in Greek rather than the Bible in French these past weeks, who should not have to feel personally responsible for his dying mother, ignored by her husband of twenty years. At least on the bench at the bottom of the garden, no one wanted anything from him. His father would not come out to him, his mother was asleep for the moment, and he had no one else in the world who might care. It was calm and quiet, the only sound the wind in the ice-covered trees. The walled garden was his alone.

Thus it was with surprise that he heard footsteps crunch across the snow and ice and felt the warm heft of a blanket across his shoulders. He looked up to see Suzanne standing over him, wrapped in her woolen cloak. "You'll catch your death out here, M. Jean."

"It doesn't matter," he said softly, looking away again, though he clutched the blanket tightly around him. It was terribly cold out.

But she sat down on the bench next to him, a gesture perhaps inappropriate in a servant, but she didn't seem to care. "I lost my mother. When I was a lot younger than you. Ain't easy, no matter how old you are."

They sat in silence for what felt to Jean an eternity before he finally decided that he approved of her presence. Particularly as, the moment he decided that he might allow himself a bit of comfort in the perfectly innocent touch of a sympathetic party, he found himself sobbing into her shoulder. He had not permitted himself to weep in so long that the emotion came in floods. She smelled of the kitchen and wool and the unmistakable scent of the female.

"Come, let's get you in where it's warm," she told him at last, but instead of sending him back to the house, she took him with her into the barn. "I was supposed to be finding eggs," she admitted.

It was dark and warm from the horses, but hardly silent as the beasts stamped their feet and the chickens who had escaped to the hayloft shuffled through the straw. Jean threw the blanket over the door of one of the stalls and climbed the ladder, following Suzanne. He never came into the barn when he needed to think – he needed the sky to counteract the pressure on his spirits. But she wasn't looking for eggs, and he sat down beside her, their legs dangling. She let him sit very close to her, and though his tears had dried as quickly as they had started, he was grateful that he was permitted the chaste touch of another living being. Even his father seemed half dead, the rows repeated as ghosts repeated their lives, unable to deviate from the path set long ago.

The barn smelled of horses, and a hint of late summer in the hay, and the slightest note of female from Suzanne. Jean wanted to thank her for the attention she was showing him, but he didn't know how. Instead, he asked, "Where are you from?"

"Up in the mountains."

"A village?"

"You might call it that."

"What would you call it?

She shrugged. "It's a village."

"You speak French better than any of the maids we've had before." The use of French as the language of the church had always marked the Protestant villages – many of the peasants could read in French rather than stumble through life only in the regional patois. They always had Protestant maids, but Suzanne had cleaner pronunciation in French than any of the others had had, though the patois crept in from time to time.

"Our pastor's a missionary. He talks beautiful for a foreigner."

"Is he a Methodist?" Jean asked, somewhat eagerly. He had been permitted to attend only one Methodist service since the foreign missionaries had begun to come to shake the Protestants out of their historical Calvinism, only one service with hymns and ecstatic preaching led by an Englishman, before his father decided that this was quite certainly a step too far. Which Jean thought rather harsh, considering he had been put through the paces of a Catholic upbringing his father did not even believe in, but M. Prouvaire was a true product of the Gard, less trusting of the Revolution than his fellow clandestine worshipers had been and reaping the rewards of caution. The Methodist missionaries were not cautious in the least, and their prayer meetings were terribly exciting because of their daring.

"He is. He comes from England. So he doesn't speak a bit of the patois, and neither does his wife, but they teach us beautiful French. The readings are so much nicer the way they do them."

"And the songs?"

"Ah, but the English are not so musical as we are."

"It must be amazing to have a Methodist service every week."

"It is. I miss it."

"Why did you come here?"

"A girl needs a dowry if she's going to get married, doesn't she?"

"Your father is too poor to give you one?"

"I have a sister and two brothers. I'll earn my own, I said. My father's grateful I'm in service to a good family, at least, though I do wish I didn't have to sit through services at your temple."

"I wish I could go to the Methodists, too."

It was rather strange that he feel so close to the maid, but he had been stuck among Catholics for so long, sent to Avignon where no one knew he came from a Protestant family, that it was a relief to hear from someone, anyone, about the way the community was opening up, taking chances they hadn't taken in centuries. The missionaries from Switzerland and England were spreading new ways of worship across the Midi, and Jean was missing out on it all.

"What's it like to live with the Catholics all the time?" she finally asked him. He perhaps ought to have found it improper, answering personal questions from the housemaid, but in the moment, two young people sitting in the hayloft, it was merely a natural progression of the conversation he had started.

What was it like? It was how it was. It was not too different to living with his father, keeping his head down and professing very little publicly, seeming to have his head in the clouds when really he was concentrating on something no one around him could ever understand. "I count down the days until I don't have to censor my thoughts anymore, until I can leave and be free. That's just how it is."

"I'm sorry," she told him. She sounded honestly sorry, too. Jean leaned over and kissed her cheek, then blushed scarlet. He had really only meant to thank her, not to discover that her cheek was softer than he had expected, the scent of her suddenly strong in his nostrils. Certainly not for her to lean in and kiss him full on the lips. The last time he had been kissed was the boys poking fun at him, and the contrast, the comfort, the varying forms of need which she had sated just by her calm, youthful presence, combined to bring to the fore another need.

"Oh, dear. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He could feel his prick hardening, and all he could think of was sin, how he had to pull away, slide back into the depths and, without stepping on any hidden eggs, commit the lesser sin rather than the greater.

But Suzanne wouldn't let him go. She took him by the hand, saw what was the matter, and opened his trousers herself.

"You're going to go to Hell."

"As the apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men, I have longed for his shadow and sat myself in it, and his fruit was sweet on my tongue." Jean was on his back, somewhat panicked; she took his prick in her hand and started stroking it so that he no longer knew what he was thinking. "He has led me into the festival hall and the standard he raises to me cries: LOVE. Refresh me with grapes, strengthen me with apples, for I am faint with love. May his left hand be under my head, and may his right embrace me."

It was not an order – it was a breathless recitation of the Song of Songs, a passage he knew well – but he did find himself reaching up with his right hand to embrace her. But soon enough it was all over, his seed spraying over her hand. He felt horribly warm, as if he must be blushing down to his prick, and Suzanne was kneeling beside him, wiping her hand in the hay. They were assuredly going to burn in Hell. Onanism was bad enough, the wasting of seed even worse, and through the conjunction of an unmarried couple – they would burn for eternity. Jean buttoned his trousers, and knelt to pray.

Suzanne made a quick grab near his knee, and he looked daggers at her. "Sorry. Egg." She held it up to show him.

"We're going to Hell," he admitted.

She shrugged. "You look a sight better than when I found you. Help me find more – they're for a custard for your mother."

It was easier to look for eggs than to think about his failure. It was easier to look for eggs than to notice how Suzanne bent over, her hips and buttocks almost asking to be caressed. He was going to Hell. "It's a metaphor," he said, running his hands through the hay, feeling for a hard roundness, trying not to think of the firm roundness he knew was just behind his back.

"What?"

"The Song of Songs. It's a metaphor. For the love of God."

"That's what the pastor says."

"Then why did you sully it?"

"I just did what it was about. It can be about Heaven and earth."

He passed her another egg he had found, their fingers momentarily brushing as she took it from him to hold in her apron. "It's not right."

She met his eyes. "No, it's not right. You're my master, not my beloved. I've got my own young man at home."

"How can you marry him after what you just did?"

"I've done more with him than I have with you."

"You're evil. A temptress."

"Am I?"

"No," he had to admit. She had nothing in common with the painted ladies of Avignon or Nîmes and certainly nothing in common with the lower whores who had been noted in the streets of Alais. "You have given me nothing I did not need. 'During the nights on my couch, I looked for the one my soul loved; I looked for him, but I never found him. I will get up now, and make a tour of the city, of the streets and squares; I will look for the one who loves my soul. I looked, but I did not find him,'" he recited with a desperate fervour he always held in check when reading to his mother. "It isn't about God, is it?" She shook her head. "God is everywhere I look, and He loves all His creation, He loves my soul. He is not who I can't find. I want to meet your pastor. I think he knows more than the priests I always see in Avignon."

"How can a priest know anything, never living in the world as it is? Go down first – I've got to watch out for the eggs." She didn't need his help to descend the ladder, but he felt rather chivalrous, being there to catch her should she slip. "Go on back to your mother," she told him. "You know the Desert as well as any of us. You wait and you pray, and soon enough you'll be a man and be able to walk out of the Desert into the truth, whatever your truth is." She kissed him on the forehead – they were very much of a height – and left him standing in the barn.

Out of the Desert and into truth. How wonderful that would be. M. Prouvaire did not like hearing tales of the old Camisards, though Jean had always loved them. Resist. Not merely believe, but act. If he could only sneak away to the Methodists, perhaps something would calm his soul, the music or the openness or even just the great difference between the glory of the temple and the stagnation of home.

His mother was awake when he returned to her bedside. "Your cheeks are red," she said weakly. "Have you been outside?"

"Just for a bit of air."

"Yes, one shouldn't overheat the child. I'm sorry." She touched the Bible that lay on the table beside her bed. "Would you read something?"

"What shall I read?" he asked quietly, calmly. The deathwatch tone of the salon did not permit frustration, merely the calm of half-life.

"Anything."

He opened to what he thought was a random page. "'Sing to the Eternal a new song; because he has done marvelous things: his right hand and his holy arm have delivered them. The Eternal has made his salvation known; he has revealed his justice to the eyes of nations.'"

Mme Prouvaire fell back into a doze. Jean felt the wonder of God bring peace to his heart. May all the rivers clap their hands and all the mountains sing with joy before the Eternal. Because he comes to judge the earth; he will judge the world with justice, and the peoples with equity.


End file.
